Thursday, March 23, 2017

Why celebrity activists piss me off

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, March 22.)

I tuned into the BBC World
Service in the middle of the night recently, as one does, and found myself
listening to an interview with an American woman whose identity, since I came in part-way through, was not evident to me.

She was lamenting the
appalling state of the world and the heartlessness of the people who allow it
to be that way.

Donald Trump wasn’t
mentioned, but he might as well have been, along with all the other people in
positions of power who apparently don’t care about the downtrodden and
marginalised.

It was a familiar display of
verbal hand-wringing. She had that slightly whiny tone sometimes adopted by
people who know exactly what’s wrong with the world, if only others could share
their insight and compassion.

It should have come as no
surprise to learn, when the interview ended, that I’d been listening to
Angelina Jolie. And I found myself analysing what it is about Jolie and others
of her ilk – such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Bono, Emma Thompson, Sean Penn and even
my favourite actress, Meryl Streep – that makes my hackles rise when I hear
them pontificating about all the injustice in the world.

To be fair, Jolie at least
puts her money where her mouth is. You could argue she has earned the right to
pontificate through her humanitarian work with refugees and displaced persons.

The others, I’m not sure
about. Bono, for instance, seems to do most of his supposed philanthropy with
his mouth.

It seems to me that the main
reason these people pontificate is that an admiring media provides them with a ready-made
platform.

They don’t have to
demonstrate any serious commitment to the causes they espouse. (Again, Jolie is
an exception here.) It’s enough that they have half-baked opinions on emotive
issues such as poverty and refugees.

I regard this as a misuse, if
not abuse, of their privileged position. They seem to assume that their
celebrity status confers some sort of moral authority on them.

Well, it doesn’t. They have
no more moral authority than the bank teller, the bus driver and the
supermarket checkout operator.

The only difference is that
wealth and, crucially, media adulation gives Hollywood stars – and some rock
singers too – the luxury of being able to present themselves as the conscience
of the Western world. They are encouraged in this belief by fawning
interviewers who never ask hard questions.

But what are they, really?
They are performers. Jolie is an actor, and many would say not a particularly
good one. And what do actors do? They make immense sums of money by pretending
to be other people.

They recite words written by
others and are made to look good by skilled directors, cinematographers, film
editors and (not least) makeup artists.

They haven’t climbed
mountains, performed acts of heroism, made ground-breaking scientific
discoveries or written great books. Yet for some reason people genuflect before
them in awe.

Good for Jolie if she spends
some of her wealth helping less fortunate people, but that doesn’t endow her
with infinite wisdom. It doesn’t mean she knows the answers to the intractable
problems dogging the world.

And here’s another thing.
Activist celebrities enjoy the luxury of being able to pontificate without ever
having to deliver results.

Unlike the politicians they
often condemn, they don’t have to make complex policy decisions or choose
between agonisingly conflicting priorities. And unlike politicians in a
democracy, who must face the voters every few years, they are not accountable
to anyone.

They don’t, for example, have
to confront redundant workers from Detroit car plants or Pennsylvania steel
mills who voted for the despised Trump because they felt robbed of hope and
dignity. And they don’t have to face people from previously safe, stable
Western European societies that have been ravaged by the multiculturalism that
stars like Jolie espouse.

But they have money. They fly
around the world in first-class or in private jets, apparently choosing to
ignore their rather substantial carbon footprint (although still tut-tutting
about climate change).

They stay in five-star luxury
lodges and address $1000-a-head charity dinners. How much more agreeable than
having to find fair and practicable solutions to real problems or to be held
accountable for real results.

Oh, and they can afford to
adopt children from Third World countries to demonstrate their kindness and
their passion for diversity.

Adoptees from the Third World
sometimes look like the latest Hollywood fashion accessory. Why not adopt
children from their own country? They’re often just as needy. But it wouldn’t
look as exotic, and it wouldn’t score quite so many political points.

Just once, I would like an
interviewer to confront celebrity activists such as Jolie with the unarguable fact that capitalism and
globalisation, which Jolie apparently blames for many of the world’s ills, have
raised more people out of poverty, and eliminated more disease, than any of the
fuzzy, ill-defined but fashionably soft-left ideologies promoted by her and
others like her.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.